remaining hand were cutting into Longtree's throat, the stump beating him around the face, eliciting cries of pain from its owner each time it struck. It was as much the insanity of the situation as the attack that made the marshal drop his rifle and stagger back, shielding his eyes. Claussen was on him, kicking, striking, clawing, trying to bite. Longtree shoved him away, kicked him fiercely in his lamed leg and struck him in the face with a series of quick jabs. Claussen, old cuts on his face opening, fell to his knees.
Longtree, picking up his rifle, walked slowly to the altar.
A ghostly, smoky light rained in through the stained glass windows. They had been defaced with perverse drawings now. The pulpit loomed ahead, the defiled altar, and the beast, bleeding and asleep.
Dr. Perry had been added to the fiend's roll call of victims. He had been crucified on the great wooden cross, spikes stolen from the shattered altar driven through his hands and ankles. He hung above the beast, an aged and depraved Christ, rivers of red wine staining the altar cloth below.
Longtree looked down on the beast.
He wondered if it was dead. For just one hopeful, fleeting moment, he thought it might be. Dead or dying. But he knew it was neither. In his mind he saw the butchered faces of its victims, the dead children. Had it visited the Blackfeet camp yet? Were Laughing Moonwind and her folk dead now?
No time to think.
The beast was sprawled on the altar. A blood-streaked, stinking mass of foul intent. It was tight with throbbing muscle and jutting bone. Its shoulders broad, its head huge. Its cavernous mouth open, black spiny tongue stuck to its lower lip. Its eyes were wide and staring, but it did not have lids as such.
It was a horror.
Longtree thought it seemed to be composed of many things. It had bits of fur like a mammal. The thorny, exaggerated flesh of a lizard. The ridged, armored torso of insect. The hooked, yellowed claws of a bird of prey. The spiked and skeletal tail of a saurian. Yet, it resembled a man, in form only, but it did all the same. Some bastard, perverse uncle of humanity.
Longtree took aim at its head.
There was a bustle of commotion from the vestibule. Lauters, Bowes, and a few others stomped in, shoving Claussen aside.
'Longtree!' Lauters shouted.
The beast stirred.
Christ, Longtree thought, so close, so close…
The men were charging up the altar now, talking excitedly amongst themselves at how the marshal had slain the monster. Longtree backed away into the chancel.
'It's alive,' he muttered.
And it was.
One sheer membranous eyelid opened crustily, then another. Slitted pupils stirred in seas of glowing red. They expanded to take in light. The mouth dropped open, lips thinned and drew away from swollen, black gums, teeth sliding forth like arrows from a quiver. The beast was awake.
It stood up before Longtree, easily eight feet in height. It was, Longtree decided, his finger tickling the trigger of his rifle, an amazing exercise in lethal anatomy.
It looked to be armored for battle like a knight of old. Like a fleshy, living skeleton. Its arms fed into sockets just beneath the shoulders which were shielded by jutting plates. The legs, the same, plates concealing their origin. Its torso was gleaming with ribbed mounds, knitted with a black oily skin that bled into gray, riddled with numerous lacerations and punctures. It had no neck, the head firmly mounted on the sloping shoulders, jaw protruding in a quasi-snout, nostrils flattened and bulging with each rasping breath. There seemed to be barely enough flesh to cover the protruding architecture of the massive skull. It was drawn tight, scarred and thinning. Silver and gray tufts of fur sprouted here and there like weeds through cracks in rock.
A thing engineered to stalk and kill and take any amount of abuse thrown at it. The ultimate hunter. Built to survive in a savage world of half-humans and monsters that no longer existed.
The beast took one step forward.
One of the men-the one who'd lost his brother to this horror-charged forth, screaming out a battle cry. The beast took his knife in the abdomen and then took the man himself. Before the cowering, helpless eyes of the posse, the man was pulled apart, his viscera decorating the altar. There was nothing to do but watch.
The body was dropped. The beast crushed the head with a grinding of a bony heel, wetting the remains down with a gush of viscous, steaming piss.
Longtree and the others fell back, shooting.
Skullhead felt more bullets pierce his hide. He took them and roared, still standing. He'd been deceived into thinking these white-skins had brought offerings of themselves. But it was not so; they refused to obey the ancient laws. So, great instructor in all things bloody and agonizing, Skullhead would teach them.
Longtree watched the beast move. It had just absorbed no less than a dozen bullets, and here it leaped like an angry child, that great tail thrashing. It knocked Lauters aside and grabbed the first available man. With a grinding, an awful wet snapping, it separated the first man at the hip, tossing legs one way and body the other. The man screamed and flopped, legless, blood coming out in a flood.
As more shots were fired, Longtree ran to the small fire Claussen had built and removed a chair leg, the end of which was a flaming red coal. As the monster turned on him, he jumped up and jammed the torch in its face, falling back before he was swatted away. Its left eye and much of the flesh around it was incinerated into a sap of blackened fluid. The beast roared, swinging out madly in all directions, claws whistling through the air seeking life to take.
Bowes got behind it and opened up its muscled back with blasts from his shotgun. It turned on him and Lauters and another assailed it from the front with bullets. The beast howled with rage, pounding dust from the rafters overhead. Its back was ripped wide, glistening vertebrae exposed.
'Its eye!' Longtree shouted. 'Shoot out its eye!'
As the men attempted to do this, Longtree turned and saw Laughing Moonwind and Herbert Crazytail coming up the aisle. The old man was dressed out in his finest. He wore a shirt of antelope skin, matching leggings. Both ornamented with colored beads, feathers, and dyed porcupine quills. He wore a skull mask over his face and carried a medicine club decorated with wolf fur, weasel skin pendants, and topped by the foot of a wolf, claws extended. He pushed past Longtree and the others, facing the beast.
At the sight of him, Skullhead stopped dead.
Crazytail took items from his medicine bag-bits of herb, pinches of colored powder, feathered talismans-and threw them at the beast. He chanted and sang, circling the beast now, forming a circle of powder around it.
'What's that crazy injun doing?' Lauters asked.
No one answered. The beast had paused now, whether held by magic or by curiosity, it was held all the same.
'It killed everyone in the village,' Moonwind said sternly. 'Only a few of us escaped…'
'What is your father doing?' Longtree asked.
'Binding him.'
'Will it work?'
She shook her head. 'No, but he feels responsible. He and the others brought it back. It should never have seen the light of day again.'
The beast suddenly grew bored with the ceremony. Teeth went in motion, burying in the old man's head, his skull pulped under the jaws. He fell dead at the monster's feet.
Laughing Moonwind screamed.
Lauters walked right up to it, emptying his rifle into its hide. 'No more! Goddammit, this ends now!'
The beast put hands to either side of Lauters' head, lifting him into the air and crushing his skull slowly into mush. Longtree dashed away to get another stick from the fire and saw salvation: pushed beneath a pew was a can of kerosene.
The beast charged him and he uncapped the metal jug, letting its contents wash it down. Skullhead ignored this benediction and slammed into him, sending the marshal sailing through open air. In the process, the beast stumbled into the fire. In the time it took him to feel the pain of the embers beneath his feet, flames had licked up and over him. He spun and danced, trying to shake the kiss of fire.
